40th and 41st Arkansas Spring Lecture Series in the Mathematical Sciences

University Of Arkansas, Fayetteville AR

Investigators

Abstract

The 40th Spring Lecture Series in the Mathematical Sciences (SLS) will take place March 5th--7th, 2015, and the 41st Spring Lecture Series in the Mathematical Sciences will take place April 14th--16th, 2016; both will be hosted by the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville, Arkansas. This grant supports travel and lodging, both for the expert speakers who have been invited, and for the graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and young professors who attend the conferences but do not have their own means of support. These conferences provide opportunities for dissemination of research results, discussions that lead to new discoveries and collaborations, and for professional development of the junior participants. The broader impact of the conferences also includes some events that will be supported entirely by the University of Arkansas, including a public mathematics lecture each year, and networking events for women in mathematics and for graduate students. More specifically, the 2015 conference will feature lectures by Professor Benson Farb of the University of Chicago on representation stability, and the 2016 conference will feature lectures by Professor Peter Ozsvath of Princeton University, on Heegaard Floer Homology. Both conferences will have talks by ten expert invited speakers in addition to the principal lecturer, as well as contributed talks by participants. The 2015 conference will explore sequences of representations of groups that arise in topology, geometric group theory, algebraic geometry, abstract algebra and other subjects, and make connections between these diverse fields. The 2016 conference will focus on new techniques and applications of Heegaard Floer Homology and Bordered Floer Homology to 3- and 4-manifolds, as well as to contact and symplectic topology. The website for the conference series is http://math.uark.edu/3742.php .